New Books in Catholic Studies

Why has the Catholic Church in India become so engaged in environmental initiatives? And what does the wider Indian political context defined by an assertive Hindu nationalism mean for the ability of church actors to pursue environmental agendas? In this episode, we are joined by Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Nihar Gokhale who have examined these questions in the Indian state of Goa, focusing on church a...

At age 22, Sydney’s Bennett’s brain stopped communicating with her body correctly; she was suffering from Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), a condition in which the nervous system stops sending or interpreting signals the right way. Suddenly this bright, beautiful, college girl, recently married, was having seizures, numbness, difficulty moving. Soon she needed a cane, then a wheelchair. But...

The modern relationship between the Vatican and the State of Israel is rooted in a long history of hostility between Judaism and Roman Catholicism. Through the centuries, popes and theologians marginalized the Jewish people, assigning them collective guilt for the death of Jesus Christ and claiming that the sacred territory of Palestine was the true patrimony of the Roman Catholic Church. With the...

In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Stephen C. E. Hopkins explores how hell became a place for...

The end of the fourteenth century was a time of upheaval and contested authority among the traditional institutions of medieval Europe. In response to these conditions, a number of people began to claim their own authority, as prophets speaking the word of God. They came from outside of the clerical elite and were mostly women and reformers. Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1...

When Hollywood director Rian Johnson started making Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out mystery (a movie you can watch on Netflix), he needed some help. His uncle and aunt in Denver connected him with their pastor in Denver, Father Scott Bailey, who became an advisor to the project. He talks about the process and the big questions of this movie with me. (And I admit: I hated the beginning and sto...

In the Greco-Roman world, gods were known to tame soundscapes, or acoustic landscapes. Zeus, Apollo, Orpheus, and other Classical deities demonstrated their power by bringing order to chaotic sound worlds, replacing cacophony with harmony. In late antiquity, Christians took up this archetype and applied it to Jesus. For many early Christians, the advent of Christ resembled the modern phenomenon of...

As we move into Holy Week, the Triduum, Easter and its season, all Christians ask themselves ‘what is this all about?’ and why God created such and elaborate salvific economy that relies on our faith and His actions. Why? There’s a great Mystery here and the more we appreciate its size and depth, even if we don’t understand what we are seeing. Anne Blackwill and I have been talking about doing thi...

Empire and imperial frameworks, policies, practices, and cultures have shaped the history of the world for the last two millennia. It is nation states that are the blip on the historical horizon. Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer re-examines empire as process—and Ireland's role in it—through the lens of early modern...

Dr. Lucy Donkin’s Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2022) illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in Medieval Western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. “The ground...

A People's Church brings together a distinguished international group of historians to provide a sweeping introduction to Christian religious life and institutions in medieval Italy. Each essay treats a single theme as broadly as possible, highlighting both the unique aspects of medieval Christianity on the Italian peninsula and the beliefs and practices it shared with other Christian societies. B...

Following Pope Leo’s State of the World Address in January of 2026, the three American Cardinals who are also diocesan archbishops Cardinal Cupich (Archbishop of Chicago), Cardinal McElroy (Archbishop of Washington), and Cardinal Tobin (Archbishop of Newark)—in addition to Archbishop Broglio, the pastor of the US military—have been reminding the people of the United States that the American govern...

In Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (U Chicago Press, 2023), Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Ma...

In the writings of ancient Christians, the near-ubiquitous references to the "fear of God" have traditionally been seen as a generic placeholder for piety. Focusing on monastic communities in late antiquity across the eastern Mediterranean, Fear of God: Practicing Emotion in Late Antique Monasticism (U California Press, 2025) by Dr. Daniel Eastman An explores why the language of fear was so preval...

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (Liveright, 2023) by Dr. Jamie Kreiner presents a revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge—and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later. Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them...

The first book of its kind, Less Than Victory: American Catholics and the Vietnam War (Cambridge UP, 2025) by Dr. Steven J. Brady explores both the impact the Vietnam War had on American Catholics, and the impact of the nation's largest religious group upon its most controversial war. Through the 1960s, Roman Catholics made up one-quarter of the population, and were deeply involved in all aspects...

The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration. Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 15...

Father Ron Rolheiser’s new book Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years, which is about how to grow old well and be fruitful, first giving your life away and then your death so as to be a blessing. That’s a recipe for joy. We also talked about mysticism, St. John of the Cross, and some miraculous experiences in real people’s lives that reveal God abiding and deep love, mercy, and...

Before the Scientific Revolution, Western medicine was thought in terms of humors: cheerful people were sanguine and had a lot of blood, fiery cholerics had an excess of yellow bile, gloomy Melancholics had black bile, and mellow phlegmatics had phlegm of course. And the balancing of humors—hot and cold, wet and dry—was the key to a healthy life. It sounds medieval, it is, rooted in ancient Greeks...

The twentieth century is understood as an era of growing, inexorable secularism, yet in Britain between the 1890s and the 1960s there was a marked turn to Rome. In the first half of the century, Catholicism became an intellectual and spiritual fashion attracting more than half a million converts, including fascinating artists, writers, and thinkers. What drew these men and women to join the church...

Bishop Daniel talks like a Texas Protestant in terms of Church Planting and giving your heart to Christ, but actually he is a bishop in the Orthodox Church in India where his father was born. His native village close to where the Apostle Thomas landed almost two thousand years ago. But Bishop Daniel is not part of the old Malankar Syriac Church in India, but of the Believers Eastern Church founded...

The Philosophy of Drama (U Notre Dame Press, 2024), by the Catholic philosopher Józef Tischner (translated by Artur Rosman, University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), explores human existence as dramatic existence—shaped by encounter, dialogue, temptation, and the hope for justification or salvation. In this conversation, Rosman reflects on the challenges of translating Tischner’s work and considers...

A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness o...

The letters stemming from the First Crusade are premier sources for understanding the launch, campaign, and aftermath of the expedition. Between 1095 and 1100, epistles sustained social relationships across the Mediterranean and within Europe, as a mixture of historical writing, literary invention, news, and theological interpretation. They served ecclesiastical administration, projected authority...

This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiritual devotion - they are also political acts, affirmations of identity and engagements with deep-rooted historical narratives. In Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World (Profile, 2025) Professor Kathryn Hurlock follows the trail of pilgrimage...